Today I have lost 192 reputation.

Mostly due to a question being removed, in which my answer had received 18 upvotes, so all 180 points were removed.

In addition, I've received 2 downvotes on an answer I gave, and 2 downvotes on a question I asked over a week ago.

Am I justified in thinking this is a really rash decrease in reputation? It seems to me like an awfully odd coincidence that my question receives no votes for 8 days, only to have two downvotes one minute apart.

Thank you guys for the discussion. See the comments to the answer for more information on serial downvoting, because I did ask that even though I'm not a victim here, how would someone know if they had been a victim of it? I think that's an important fact everyone should be aware of.

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    It is not a strong signal. I'd work from the assumption that the bounty you put on one of your questions is working, it is drawing attention. That's of course not guaranteed to be the "good" kind of attention. It will be better tomorrow. – Hans Passant Oct 25 '14 at 20:48
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    I have to say, it sucks that a deleted questions lose you reputation like that. I'd hate to lose 180 points overnight because an OP suddenly decided to clear their question history. – C Bauer Oct 26 '14 at 15:16
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    If a user deletes a question that has significantly upvoted answers, wouldn't it make sense to make this question a community-owned question (maybe modulo some exceptions)? I mean, the idea of SO is to provide answers not only for the OP of the question, right? – honk Oct 26 '14 at 17:01
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    @honk Maybe but what if the question deserved to be deleted? Answers aren't much help on a crap question. If the question deserved to be deleted then nobody should have answered it and therefore losing rep is par for the course. You can always vote to undelete a question if you think the deletion was unwarranted. – Lightness Races in Orbit Oct 26 '14 at 17:36
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    don't bother yourself for reputation crap, it doesn't mean anything. – Mehmet Fide Oct 26 '14 at 17:42
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    @LightnessRacesinOrbit: You are right, this is why I mentioned that there might be exceptions. I don't have a full solution for this, but one could think about a specific review process. Regarding undeleting questions: I understood that you need 10k rep to view deleted questions, or am I wrong? – honk Oct 26 '14 at 17:47
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    @honk: Well, yeah, true. I often forget about you lowly under-10k-ers ;p – Lightness Races in Orbit Oct 26 '14 at 17:48
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    @LightnessRacesinOrbit: I'd very much like to have your problems ;) – honk Oct 26 '14 at 17:49
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    I don't want to fight over reputation, I understand they're just fake points, but it does become a sort of added credibility moving forward. I have been working hard to build that credibility on this website. – AdamMc331 Oct 26 '14 at 17:57
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    @MehmetFide: I totally agree. However, if rep could be exchanged for a beer or two ... ;) – The Blue Dog Oct 26 '14 at 18:07
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    The word 'Victim' is thrown around like a football nowadays... – PW Kad Oct 27 '14 at 3:29
  • @HansPassant you were quite right about being better tomorrow. I have worked really hard at providing my best answers and am currently up 172 rep for the day. Pulling for the 200 max! – AdamMc331 Oct 27 '14 at 4:16
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    @McAdam331 I get regular down votes on some of my best explained answers, you can do nothing but ignore and move ahead... see the other side, you have 697 rep – Mr. Alien Oct 27 '14 at 12:26
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    @PWKad Where I come from, footballs don't get thrown around. They get kicked. ;-) – chiastic-security Oct 27 '14 at 22:21
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    Well, there you go. I was downvoted 8 times today, the world is in balance :) – Hans Passant Oct 27 '14 at 23:24

You are not the victim of a serial vote, no.

The post deletion does not play in the serial voting script; it is not a up- or down-vote given to you by another user.

That leaves the 4 downvotes you received. Because those 4 downvotes were against only 2 different posts, it took (at least) two different people, and 2 votes against you from one person generally is not seen as a serial vote by the system.

Note that you have a bounty on the question; you are attracting attention to the post. That attention can go both ways!

The two downvotes on your answer occurred shortly after you posted it. It could be that the people that downvoted your bountied question found it because they looked at your profile and saw that you had a bounty open.

If you had been a victim of serial voting, you'd have seen:

  • a series of up- or down-votes, all on different posts in a short amount of time
  • those votes reverted when the serial voting reversal script runs; it'll run every night around 3:00 UTC and you'll see a serial voting reversed entry in your reputation history.
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    Makes sense. Seemed odd to have that kind of attention so late in the bounty period though, but anything is possible. Admittedly, I was a little rattled to lose 180 points, but I will just keep plugging to get it back. – AdamMc331 Oct 25 '14 at 20:52
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    @McAdam331: Yup, it happens. Was the question perhaps of dubious quality? Or was the account that posted it deleted and the question had a negative score? If so, that's the risk you took when you answered the post. Having posted 11.000+ answers I have lost a fair few too, you move on and keep answering! – Martijn Pieters Oct 25 '14 at 20:54
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    A legit question though is how would one know if they are a victim of serial downvoting? Sure, I'm not in this case, but what would be signs of it if it did happen? – AdamMc331 Oct 26 '14 at 5:40
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    @McAdam331: you'd see the votes reverted within 24 hours (at 3:00 UTC a script runs). You'd have several posts (all different) voted on in a short timespan. – Martijn Pieters Oct 26 '14 at 9:49

Short answer, no, as Martijn said.

Serial downvoting would be if you looked at your answers/questions list and saw that a large number of them had all been downvoted once. That would indicate a single person going through post by post and downvoting everything you have done. Example:

enter image description here

In cases like the above, when it's blatant, the system picks it up and will reverse quickly. The only scary thought is someone who starts going at it over a several week period. A downvote here, one there, maybe an upvote thrown in to confuse the system.

Given that you had 2 people downvoting, and had only two posts affected, you aren't currently being attacked.

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    Scary thought 2: Distributed down voting (over multiple accounts) over different IP's per account, down and up voting a few times per day every day...unstoppable ? – TheLegendaryCopyCoder Oct 28 '14 at 15:13

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